VMware: USB-Harddisk within the Service Console

In deze post lees je hoe je een USB-Harddisk kun aansluiten en gebruiken binnen het VMware ESX Service Console. Binnen het Service Console kun je geen gebruik maken van NTFS partities. Gelukkig kwam ik deze oplossing tegen op de blog van Mike Laverick (http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/)

Firstly, NTFS drives don’t appear to be mountable at Service Console. Despite the fact that normally Redhat Linux has a R/O driver for NTFS no matter what I did I couldn’t get the Service Console to recognise the partition.

1. Delete any partitions from the removable drive using Disk Management in Windows
2. Right-click the disk and select “New Partition” and follow these steps, clicking “Next” to get move on at each stage.
3. Select Primary Partition
4. Enter the maximum size for the Partition Size
6. Choose assign a drive letter. In my case I used F:
7. Select “Do not Format this partition”
8. There will be a dialog box, summarising all the previous stuff.
9. Click Finish

Rather using M$ format command or tools which limit the format to 32GB, I found a format tool on the internet that allow you to break through the 32GB barrier. It’s called fat32format.exe and it can be downloaded from here:

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?fat32format.htm

The syntax of the fat32format command is very simple – as its the same as the standard format command namely:

fat32format

Mounting the drive at the console is very easy. Login to the Service Console as root and make a mounting point with something like mkdir /mnt/usbdisk. Plug-in the drive and read the info on the screen to see the device name for the drive such as /dev/sdk. Then mount it to the usbdisk with mount /dev/sdk1 /usbdisk.

Thanks Mike for digging this out.

Bron: http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/